What a kerfuffle…
Opted for the power saving, more responsive Liquorix Debian kernel. The install
went pretty painlessly courtesy of the smxi installers. But it wont work with
the network-manager on wireless since killing X kills the networking connection
too. Daft. So be prepared with an ethernet cable. So, great. I reboot and:-
> uname -a
Linux development.richardriley.net 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Wed Aug 25 14:28:12 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
WOOt! But wait! Whats this? No wireless. Oh yes, thats right : the weird and
wacky world of Debian politics means I need to run the module assistant to
install the sources and build the driver for the bcm43q13 wireless device. God
forbid they should forget all that and just have something that works out of the
box and actually attract new users. Oh no. So m-a is used once more. Except it
crashes out. What do do? A quick google revealed the wonderul linux wireless
website which maintains up to date repos of all wireless SW. Well, most. Should
be simple!
Have a read and decide that the brcm80211 driver should suffice. great! So
install the debian firmware-brcm80211 using aptitude.
sudo aptitude install firmware-brcm802011
Now follow the linux wireless instructions. Cant be too hard… and it wasn't!
Download the latest code. Unarchive to my usual build tree. Now its time for the
money shot.
./scripts/driver-select brcm80211
make && sudo make install
Crikey! It compiled. Now remove any existing driver and install the new one:-
sudo modprobe -r brcm80211
sudo modprobe -r wl
sudo modprobe brcm80211
All this was done over an ssh link from my main development machine to my Asus
netbook via ethernet cable btw. So lets try this driver .. oh no. Lets not. The
famous Linux BSOD….. Black Screen Of Death…
!(sdu->cloned) failed : file wlc_mac80211.c line 5140
Quickly subscribing to the mail list for linux-wireless
(linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org) I had the solution .. remove the offending
line and remake!
Bingo! It works.
And that ladies and gentleman was my day….
--
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